Versatile Express

The Versatile Express family of development platforms provides users with a modular board design for use testing different ARM SOC design implementations. QEMU provides the ability to emulate ARM Versatile Express for Cortex-A9 on your desktop computer for easy experimentation!

Technical Specifications

Running Fedora through QEMU

This page will give you detailed instructions for running Fedora 18 through QEMU. The tarball includes all that is needed to boot your system including the root filesystem image and the pre-extracted kernel and initramfs. Also, included for your convenience is a script to boot using a serial connection or the XFCE desktop. WARNING: If you will be doing development with this image then it is recommended that you add 10-15GB to the root partition before booting.

Download the image

There are two Versatile Express images available for use with QEMU, a hardware floating point (armhfp), and a software floating point(arm). If you are unsure of which to choose, the hard floating point image is recommended, and will be used in the provided examples below (adjust accordingly for 'arm'):

The default root password is "fedora". This should be changed immediately.

Expanding the Disk Image

You can easily expand the root partition of the disk image using qemu-img.

For example to increase the image size by 10GB you can issue:

qemu-img resize ./file.img +10G

Doing this before booting the image will cause the filesystem to be automatically resized.

If you have already booted the system then you will need to do the following:

Enlarge the disk as before:

qemu-img resize ./file.img +10G

Boot into the guest and install the rootfs-resize application.

yum install -y rootfs-resize

Enable the service to start at boot

systemctl enable rootfs-resize.service

Create an empty file in the root directory named '.rootfs-repartition'

touch /.rootfs-repartition

Reboot your guest

reboot

Your system will automatically reboot again to complete the resize (this is not automatic on QEMU, and you will need to manually start the guest again).

Release Notes

Images were composed using tools in Fedora 17 due to continuing work on Fedora 18.

When upgrading to the 3.7.X kernel you will require a device tree binary (.dtb) file for the system to boot. The provided 'boot-vexpress' script allows for the optional use of a 'dtb' file and will give a warning when booting kernels above 3.6.x.

The XFCE Desktop is not currently available when using the 3.7.x kernel.

Additional Support

There are Fedora ARM users all around the globe - if you need assistance, would like to provide feedback or contribute to Fedora ARM please visit us on the IRC - we can be found in #fedora-arm on Freenode. You can also contact us on the mailing list - arm@lists.fedoraproject.org